Mikhail Frunze

Mikhail Frunze (2 February 1885-31 October 1925) was People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs of the Soviet Union in 1925, succeeding Leon Trotsky and preceding Kliment Voroshilov. A major Red Army commander, he defeated Pyotr Wrangel's White Army in the Crimea in 1921 during the Russian Civil War but was assassinated by Josef Stalin in 1925.

Biography
Mikhail Frunze was born on 2 February 1885 in Pishpek, Russian Turkestan, in the Russian Empire (present-day Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan) to a Moldovan medical practicioner and a Russian mother, living in an Imperial Russian garrison town. He studied at Virniy (present-day Almaty, Kazakhstan) and St. Petersburg, and became a leader of the 1905 Revolution as a supporter of the Bolsheviks. In 1907 he was arrested and sentenced to death by the Russian government, but was granted a reprieve and was given a sentence of hard labor for life. In 1917, he fled from his Siberian prison and became a member of the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution. In 1918 he became Military Commissar for Ivanovo-Voznesensk Province and commanded the Southern Army Group in the Russian Civil War. He fought against Alexander Kolchak's White Army in Siberia and defeated them at Omsk in 1918, capturing Khiva in February 1918 and Bukhara in September. In November 1920, Frunze defeated Pyotr Wrangel in the Crimea, and proceeded to brutally crush Nestor Makhno's anarchist Black Army in Ukraine and Szymon Petlyura's Ukraine nationalists.

Frunze later served as the Ukrainian SSR's ambassador to Turkey, and in December 1921 he met the Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, firming Turkish-Soviet Union relations. Frunze appears in a statue in the Republic Monument of Taksim Square in Istanbul, the largest Turkish city. Frunze was elected to the Politburo of the Soviet Union on 2 June 1924 and became a politician in the government, becoming friends with Grigory Zinoviev.

Frunze's friendship with Zinoviev, who later became an opponent of Soviet premier Josef Stalin, led to his downfall. He was treated for a chronic ulceration, and Stalin and many others demanded that he undergo surgery, possibly resulting in his death. However, he did not die from the surgery. Frunze instead died of chloroform poisoning (the poison could be passed off as water, although it has a sweet scent).